Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The CNE has still to
give an exact date for the parliamentary elections scheduled for this year, but
the PSUV’s primaries to be held in June 28 provides a glimpse into the
discourse the government will use from now until the end of year campaign.

Not shy to use the
government’s media advantage, Maduro
“ceded” yesterday his weekly television show in public television “En Contacto con Maduro”, to the PSUV’s
1,162 primary candidates so that they can “go to the streets, under equal
conditions, to create awareness, to mobilize the people, with unity, to prepare
the victory for the 2015 Assembly [elections].”

Such advantage for
the ruling PSUV party is justified, according to the Agencia
Venezolana de Noticias (AVN), because the campaign by “the right” will
be “predictable, clear, and direct: they seek nothing else but to attack the
people with the economic war, which has been characterized by hoarding, usury, boycott,
and the unlimited increase of prices, especially of basic products.”

Maduro further
explained that “it is not a secret that the great capitalists, owners of the
distribution and commerce chains in the country, are allied with the Venezuelan
ultra-right in waging an economic war.”

AVN adds this
paragraph of factual information to its press note in order to help the reader
contextualize the news:

“To this [economic]
war it is necessary to add other destabilization strategies of the right, such
as the ‘Jericho Operation’, dismantled in the beginning of this year: the plan
was to co-opt military officers with the aim of generating subversive actions
in the country such as the bombing of ‘tactic objectives’ such as the
Miraflores Palace, the Ministry of Defense, the Supreme Court, the White
Palace, the Military Intelligence building, and the TV channel TELESUR.”

Saturday, May 23, 2015

The Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN) sees
a link between what it calls “the failure of the opposition primaries” to elect
its candidates for this year’s parliamentary elections, and the recent
revelations made by several international news outlets that Diosdado Cabello is
under investigation by the United States of being the leader of a drug cartel.

The plan seems to be,
according to AVN, to attack a very special symbol of the “moral strength of the
people.” That symbol is Diosdado Cabello: “For this new assault [arremetida], which has been put into
motion as a form of imperial intervention against Venezuela, aiming at the
moral strength of the people, the selected target has been Diosdado Cabello, vice-president
of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and president of the National
Assembly.”

The “weakness of the
opposition” seems to be the motive behind this recent attack against the
revolutionary moral symbol: “In the face of the weakness and demobilization of
the opposition, as evidenced in the primaries, the media infamy against Cabello
has been reactivated,” explains AVN.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

As commented in the
previous post, the government has been recently trying to link Venezuela’s
high crime rates to a plot by the opposition to supposedly destabilize the
country. The government claims that common crime should not be understood as “common”
at all, but as the result of paramilitaries acting in cahoots with the local
opposition and its foreign allies with the aim of destabilizing the country. Interior
Minister Gustavo González López calls this the “political use of criminal
gangs.”

Yesterday President
Nicolas Maduro also announced that he has “evidence of the articulation of the
main leaders of the Venezuelan and Colombian far-right with criminal gangs,
which they hire and pay with drugs and dollars to selectively murder citizens
in the streets, and thus sow chaos in the country.”

Maduro did not give
details about the evidence supporting his or González López’s claims, but called
this plot a “second front of attack”, closely linked to the “first front” which
is the economic war he claims is being waged against the country:

“The second front of
attack is organized crime, paid with the drugs and the money of the Colombian
right and ultra-right. I thus denounce it here!” further explained Maduro.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

In Venezuela the term
paramilitary commonly used to refer
to Colombian right wing criminal organizations formed during that country’s
internal conflict.

In its conspiracy rhetoric
the Venezuelan government often claims that groups it denominates as “paramilitary”
are in the country and in cahoots with the local Venezuelan opposition engaged in
“destabilizing” activities.

By explaining common crimes
in Venezuela as an expression of infiltrated paramilitaries, the government also
tries to blame the local opposition for the countries high levels of
criminality.

Yesterday for
example, the Minister of Interior, Peace and Justice, Gustavo
González López, announced that intelligence officers of the Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia
Nacional (SEBIN) have “disarticulated” a “criminal paramilitary band” which
acted under the name Gamma and operated in the Sucre Municipality of Miranda.
Opposition leader Capriles Radonski is governor of Miranda and government
officials often claim that he is protecting military groups in his state.

González Lopez
informed that several arrests had been made, but that the authorities were
still searching for the “financiers” of the group. He further assured that
those arrested “have links with the political use of criminal gangs.”

The minister also
gave his explanation of what exactly should be understood by the term paramilitary: “it is basically an answer
by the structure of the economic elite, the financial elite, the political
elite, which seeks to sustain itself in power, in a blunt an persistent form [de manera grosera y persistente], one
way or another.”

He also again linked
paramilitaries to the murder of PSUV deputy Robert Serra last year and added: “they
have mutated in a perverse way, they are trying to confuse [the population] by
making us believe we are facing a simple problem [problemita] of common crime. I want to warn that this is not a
problem of common crime but the use of common crime by the paramilitaries.”

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Victory is in sight,
announced president Maduro yesterday: “With the maximum military-civic union
and the mobilization of the People, rooted in socialism, the basis will be
consolidated for the defeat within the next four month of the economic war
waged by the right wing with the aim of destabilizing the country, through
hoarding, speculation, and smuggling of basic products,” he announced according
to the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias.

“The oligarchy is
betting on breaking our fatherland by way of the economic war, by disillusioning
the people, demoralizing it,” explained Maduro.

The new offensive will
include a propaganda push because, said Maduro, “we need an educated people,
cultivated, with a high degree of consciousness, [with] a new human
spirituality.”

On a more concrete
level, Maduro
announced that final victory in the economic war will be achieved by strengthening
State controls over the economy, specifically by more closely controlling the
fixed prices of basic products. Maduro complained that his enemies are now
using the SIMADI dollar, one of the several exchange rates fixed by the government,
as a benchmark for stablishing prices, instead of the lowest official rate: “they
twisted [the currency controls] with their evilness, as the scammers they
actually are. They are taking the people’s money from their pockets. Parasite
capitalism is taking the money from the Venezuelan people’s pockets.”

Maduro will therefore
stablish a new “scheme which will allow us to consolidate new modalities for
the establishment of just prices and for the fixing, control and compliance of compulsory
just prices in the country.”

Sunday, May 10, 2015

President Maduro
traveled to Russia for the events marking the 70th anniversary of
the end of the Great Patriotic War
and had this to say to the Spanish service Russian TV
news channel RT:

“The Venezuelan people
have the moral, political, spiritual patrimony to defeat the destabilization
aspirations of the national right wing, which are expressed in an economic war.”

He
also said: “I have tended an open hand [to the opposition], but they are in
the path of conspiracies. (…) The economic war which I am facing, which the
Venezuelan people are facing, is the main front of attack that is left for all
these neo-fascist sectors, the extremist
right which exists in Venezuela.”

Maduro however is
optimist that he will defeat the economic
war in the following months: “I have set myself in these three months,
together with special teams, [the aim] of stabilizing and regulating the supply
system, beyond all these capitalist groups that are sabotaging the Venezuelan
economy all the time.”

Saturday, May 9, 2015

As I commented a
week ago the Agencia Venezolana de
Noticias has been running a series of articles on past conspiracy theories.
The aim seems to be an attempt to construct historical evidence for the
allegation that the opposition is constantly conspiring against the government.

The interesting thing
about these two articles published so far is that no real evidence was shown at
the time for the allegations of conspiracy. However those theories are now
presented as proven events for which no further evidence needs to be provided.
Furthermore they now serve as evidence that the opposition (or the ultra-right as it is termed in the official
rhetoric), is still and permanently conspiring against the government.

Several claims unsupported
by evidence are made in this piece about a supposed failed coup attempt in 2004
called Operación Daktari. Opposition
leader Capriles Radonski and Colombian ex-president Álvaro Uribe are of course
both linked to the plot, or are at least accused of having knowledge of the
plan or of “protecting” the conspirators, with our providing any evidence. Up
to date the government has failed to even reveal proofs that the 153 Colombian
nationals arrested at the Daktari
ranch, near Caracas, were actually members of Colombian paramilitary groups as
it claimed at the time.

According to
ex-minister of Justice and Interior Miguel Rodríguez Torres the aim of the
plotters was to bomb the set Alo
Presidente, the television show of president Chávez. The plot would thus necessarily
include air force officers in the conspiracy, which provides a direct link to
the recent Blue Coup or Jericho Operation conspiracy allegations
made by
president Maduro in February.

Many thanks to Rock
Rockwell for having me again this week in his show on Latin American affairs Latin Pulse. This is the second part of
the interview we did last month. This time we talk about an issue I have
considered several times in this blog: the problem of evidence in conspiracy theories.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

In the continuation
of the trial against opposition leader Leopoldo López for allegedly instigating
violence during February 2014, the Public Prosecutor’s office has presented
what it considers a crucial piece of evidence: During February 12, the day the
protests started, López received 18 calls in his cellular phone, 16 of which
were international calls.

The Agencia
Bolivariana de Noticias does not comment on why exactly receiving international
calls would amount to evidence of the crimes López is accused (arson, damage,
public instigation, and association to commit crime), but seems to imply that
the calls are proof that López was receiving instructions from abroad.

Previous “evidence” against
López presented during the trial includes a 113 page report titled “Peritaje de análisis discursivo y prosódico”
written for the prosecution by Rosa Amelia Asuaje Léon. The
Prosecutors claim that the report shows the use by López of “subliminal messages”
instigating violence during his discourses on February 12 and after.

Monday, May 4, 2015

From 2004 to 2008
president Chávez, other government officials, and chavista journalists, claimed in several occasions
that since 2001 the governments of the United States and Spain were planning joint
military exercises in the Caribbean, and that such exercises were really a cover
for an invasion plan of Venezuela. In some of the allegations the Colombian government
and NATO were also included in the plan.

One of the first proponents
of the theory in 2004 seems to have been journalist Ernesto Villegas Poljak, in a piece
published in the web portal rebelio.org. Ernesto Villegas later became Communication
Minister and more recently special Minister for the Transformation of Caracas.

In a communique
published in the web page of the department of State in 2006, the U.S. government
denied the allegations and instead claimed that the so called “Operación Balboa”
was the name of a simulation exercise of the Escuela Superior de la Fuerzas Armadas of Spain, in which the U.S.
had had no participation.

Today the Agencia
Venezolana de Noticas has published a piece
reminding its readers of the incident. The Operación
Balboa is defined in the first paragraph as “a simulation exercise by the Spanish
army which took place between 3 and 18 May, 2001. It included, with the support
of the government of the United States, a military intervention of Venezuela
with the aim of destroying the Bolivarian Revolution and the invasion of the
south American nation to seize its oil and gas reserves.”